Walking the Boundaries is subtitled Poems 1957–1974, and collects what [Davison] considers to be the best from his previous three volumes, as well as an ample selection of new poems. Arranged more or less chronologically, Walking the Boundaries moves from the decorous formal modes of an educated, rather inhibited practitioner of poetry to more meditative autobiographical poems that demonstrate a gathering of confidence in the narrative possibilities his own experience can yield. With few exceptions, the earlier poems are stylized, overly literary, grandiose, their subject cautious and generalized…. There is an element of pathetic fallacy to Davison's imagination; his efforts to imbue situations with a larger significance than they seem really to have for him contributes to what is in the end a conflict between abstract language and specific emotion. It is this, perhaps, that accounts for the awkwardness of the speaker's voice, which, even when intended to represent...